Tales from the Galactopticon mod for Half-Life 2

I was just feeling annoyed that another mod I was interested in stopped development without any word on what was going on, and realized there haven't been any Galactopticon blog posts since an interview talking about how everything's going great, so I figured I should post something here.

In December of 2009, I and Jaanus and Uberslug started talking about making a sci-fi mod. We had a lot of ideas and started generating concepts and before long things took off into what you've seen here. The initial scope was immense--ironsighted gunplay, a branching storyline that spanned several planets, character conversation trees, and a whole bunch of gameplay mechanics that don't exist in vanilla HL2. It was definitely too much, especially since none of us was a coder, and having been a part of two other massive mod projects that never saw the light of day I should have realized that sooner.

In any case, as we started putting a team together it became apparent pretty fast that we were trying to do too much stuff--revisions saw the dumping of the branching storyline, conversation trees, until basically all we were trying to do was implement ironsights, regenerating health, and working cutscenes. Progress was being made, but a majority of our team members, including crucial people doing coding, animation, and character rigging, were busy with other projects and were able to contribute only intermittently, if at all. So while we had some great visual effects and some very nice maps and models, the nuts and bolts of the mod were not even close to a playable state, and that didn't look like it was going to change unless we could get some new dedicated team members on board. It might have looked like the mod was chugging along solidly, but it really wasn't. We just didn't have enough of a team.

In 2011 I went to an intensive art course (which I'm still in) that occupied too much of my time for me to be able to run the mod effectively. Around the same time, the SVN server we were using to host the project shut down and we were left without a replacement. After that double blow to the project, not much got done. Nobody declared the project over with, and we still have the assets, but there's no plans to continue work on the mod in its current incarnation in the near future.

We're not abandoning these characters--I've been doing a comic with Uberslug at dullahan-comic.com that features the same pirates, same spaceship, doing some of the stuff they were going to do in the mod. I'd love to revisit this universe in mod form, and I know several other team members would as well. But we don't have coders, and we don't have nearly enough artists to pull of something as substantial as what we promised. If we do something in the future it'll have to be with a team that is able to commit more time to the project, and much smaller in scope. But yes, many of us would love to do another mod project in the Galactopticon universe.

It was lame to not be more communicative with you guys a long time ago, and I do apologize for that--it didn't come from any desire to mislead, but from the fact that it can be tough to look at something one's put so much time into and just admit that it's not working. That probably sounds pretty weak after 2 years incommunicado but there it is.

Again, sorry for the lack of updates for so long, and I hope that answers some questions. If you have others, feel free to ask them in the comments.